126 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



■[2>«»S. VII. Fj£B. 12. '59. 



ever form an opinion, or rather did it ever happen to you 

 to meet with any rational opinion or conjecture of others, 

 upon that most irrational dogma of Pythagoras about 

 beans? You know what I mean, that monstrous doc- 

 trine, in which he asserts that a man might as well, for 

 the wickedness of the thing, eat his own grandmother as 

 meddle with beans. 



" De Qiiincy. Yes, the line is in the Golden Verses : / 

 remember it well. 



" Poole. True," &c., &c. 



Upon this the dialogue proceeds to charge Cole- 

 ridge with having done " some German author," 

 " a poor stick of a man," the honour to steal from 

 him an explanation of this mystic prohibition, to 

 the effect that " beans being in use in voting and 

 balloting, Pythagoras intended to charge his dis- 

 ciples, symbolically, not to interfere with elec- 

 tioneering or political intrigue." And this charge 

 of shabby theft is conveyed in as honied phrase as 

 Mrs. Candour herself could wrap it in : " Our dear 

 excellent friend Coleridge, than whom God never 

 made a creature more divinely endowed, yet, 

 strange to say, he sometimes steals from other 

 people, just as you or I might do," &c. 



Mr. Henry Nelson Coleridge, in editing the 

 Table-Talk of S. T. Coleridge, notices this attack, 

 with natural indignation, and shows that the ex- 

 planation which a " best friend" and " foremost 

 admirer" charged his relative with "honouring a 

 German scamp by stealing from him to pass as his 

 own original," w^s familiar to the "fifth form 

 boys of his day at Eton." And thougli he ex- 

 presses some surmise that his masters. Dr. Keate 

 and others, might have learned it from the Ger- 

 man, and acknowledges himself ignorant whence 

 the explanation originally came, yet he might 

 easily have found that other interpreters, besides 

 the " stick of a German," had noticed this explan- 

 ation : Dacier ( Vie de Pythagore, torn. i. cxi.) ex- 

 pressly refers to this as one of the solutions of the 

 symbol held by the ancients, and quotes Hesy- 

 chius as explaining the word "bean" as synony- 

 mous with " voting." So that Coleridge could as 

 little claim originality for the explanation (if he 

 ever did claim it) as be obnoxious to the charge of 

 plagiary from a "stick of a German" (name un- 

 known). 



« But the curious part of the whole affair is, that 

 H. N. Coleridge, in his anxiety to vindicate his 

 great namesake, should have overlooked the double 

 blunder of his candid critics : first, that of Mr. 

 Poole in quoting, as a dictum of Pythagoras, that 

 which is not his at all ; secondly, that of Mr. De 

 Quincy, when, with an ^^opium-inspired" reminis- 

 cence, he " remembered well " a line of the " Golden 

 Verses" which Jtas no existence whatever in thai 

 poem! There is not a word, much less a line, 

 about beans in the " Golden Verses." An allu- 

 sion there may be to them, as forbidden elsewhere, 

 in the 67th line ; but the Pythagorean prohibition 

 is among the " Symbola" and nowhere else. 



The fact is, that when Mr. Poole makes Pytha- 

 goras say that " a man might as loell eat his own 

 grandmother as meddle with beans,'" and when De 

 Quincy " remembered the line so well," where it 

 never existed, they had both a confused recol- 

 lection of a proverbial on dit attributed to the 

 Egyptian priests, which is quoted by Bayle from 

 Sextus Empiricus as follows : — 



" ©aTTOV a;* ras Kcc^aXas tjxiyeLV <^a<rt t<Sv iraT€ptov ri Kvaftouj." 



" Dicunt se parentum capita citius esuros quam fabas." 

 Sext. Empiricus, Pyrrhon. Hypotypos. quoted 

 by Bayle, art. Pythagoi4AS. 



The editor of The Table-Talk calls the critique 

 of De Quincy — based, as he says, on a supposed 

 conversation eight-and-twenty years before — 

 " sharp, learned, and charitable," meaning, obvi- 

 ously, that he considered it quite the reverse ; 

 but he seems not to have observed how specially 

 disentitled it was to the two first of these epithets. 



A. B, Rowan. 



PSALM CXXXVII. BY THE EAKL OP BRISTOL. 



On the fly-leaf of an old edition of Dr. Donne's 

 Poems (date 1669), which I purchased at a second- 

 hand bookseller's a little time ago, I found written 

 the enclosed in the handwriting and spelling of 

 either the last or the preceding century. 



Can you tell me who this Earl of Bristol was, 

 and if his poems are published ? 



" Psalm 137. by y« E. of Bristoll. 



" Sitting by y« streams that glide 

 Down by Babell's towering wall. 

 With our tears we fill'd y" tide. 

 Whilst our mournfuU thoughts recall 

 Thee O Sion, and thy fall. 



" Our neglected harps unstrung 

 Not acquainted with y« hand 

 Of y« skillfull tuner, hung 

 Onj-e willow trees y' stand 

 Planted in y« neighbour land. 



" Yet y® spitefull foe commands 

 Songs of Mirth, and bids us laj- 

 To dumb harps our captive hand 

 And to scoff our sorrows say 

 Sing us some sweet Hebrew laye. 



" But say we our holy strain 

 Is too pure for heathen land ; 

 Nor may we our hymns profane, 

 Tuning either voice or hand 

 To delight a savage band. 



" Holy Salim, if thy love 



Fall from my forgetfull heart. 



May y* skill by which I move 



Strings of Musick tuned by Art 



From mj' withered hand depart. 



" May my speechless tongue give sound 

 To no accent, but remain 

 In my prisoned roof fast bound. 

 If my sad soul entertain 

 Mirth till Thou rejoyce dgain I 



